


life left on the shore

by fugues



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Genre: M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, References to the summary spoilers, Spoilers to episode 126
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 00:51:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1050563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fugues/pseuds/fugues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They meet, as people always seem to, through Yuuma. Through that godforsaken war,  both of them survivors of it.</p>
<p>(more-or-less, anyway; for Alit stands every night on the roof of his apartment building and stares up at the stars, and wonders how something that used to burn close inside his soul can now be so very cold, so very far; for IV awoke from that machine and for long moments wondered why he’d ever woken up at all)</p>
            </blockquote>





	life left on the shore

**Author's Note:**

> so i was encouraged to write alit/iv and Here We Are.
> 
> why does everything i touch turn to postcanon angst

They meet, as people always seem to, through Yuuma. Through that godforsaken war,  both of them survivors of it.

(more-or-less, anyway; for Alit stands every night on the roof of his apartment building and stares up at the stars, and wonders how something that used to burn close inside his soul can now be so very cold, so very far; for IV awoke from that machine and for long moments wondered _why_ he’d ever woken up at all)

Or, at least, they come from opposite sides of that war – for Alit’s change had come after IV’s ‘death’ – and it’s what makes them learn each other’s faces. They don’t quite meet that way, though, don’t quite do more than pass by one another like ships in the night, never quite acknowledging each other as more than simply another player on this game board.

In the aftermath of it all, though, it’s not Yuuma that brings them together but chance. They merely pass one another in the street, as people do, and recognise each other. There’s the brief internal dancing – should they acknowledge each other, or pretend not to have seen each other? – before the chance passes and they’ve stared too long, leaving no choice but to greet one another.

“It’s Alit, right?” IV prompts, and truth be told it’s not a question born entirely from stiff politeness, or even from forgetting the name; he remembers it, has sat alongside Michael while Yuuma talks about the Barians, because he’d wanted, at first, to hear any mention of Ryoga, of Nasch, of whatever he’d been come the end. So he asks, because he’s heard Yuuma talk of Alit, and because this hunched over, tired-looking boy doesn’t quite – or at all – fit the way Yuuma had described him.

He confirms it, though, that that’s who he is, and then he huddles in further against the cold and offers, “You want coffee? I’ll pay.”

(and IV doesn’t, really, but the both of them stand cold and lonely in the aftermath of the Barian war and the carnage it wrought, and so he agrees to it anyway)

\----

They start to meet up more often, after that first time. The both of them lonely – for Alit now stands alone in the human world, and IV has lost his only friend – and so they come into orbit, circle one another like a satellite around a star. Which of them is the star, though, nobody knows.

(IV was a star once, the Asian Champion beloved to his fans, but he’d made certain when all was said and done that people knew who the true cheater had been and then publicly quit dueling; Alit was a star once, with fire singing through his veins, but now his body is only flesh and blood and human music is a pale imitation of the songs of the stars)

So they meet up and fall into orbit and eventually, with a kind of inevitability to it, they fall into more than that. Into bed with one another instead, long fingers on dark muscles and fists knotted in two-toned hair. And in the aftermath they lie together each time in the dark beneath the glow-in-the-dark stars pressed haphazardly to Alit’s ceiling, and then IV slides away and pulls open the blackout curtains and the spell between them is broken again, the walls between them up again. Alit the wrong Barian and IV the wrong human, and this dance and embrace between them nothing more than clutching for company against the cold emptiness of the universe.

Sometimes, too, they fight afterwards. Over little things – petty things, things that neither of them really care about at all, as though to prove that they still _can_. To prove that there’s still some life in the both of them, still some fire burning deep in their hearts.

They help one another. In drinks shared over a too-small table; in quick fucks under fake stars; in heated words and flying fists, they heal each other. In burnt tongues and bad coffee; in raised heartbeats and hickies; in bruises and bitemarks, they start to find hope again. A hope past the Barians, past stars and scars and fire.

And somewhere, somehow along the way, it gets to be something more. It starts to matter. They talk, for the first time, about things outside of the now. About the open wounds finally beginning to close after weeks, after months.

(IV tells Alit about Ryoga and Tron, and Alit tells him in return about the prince, about Mizael, about Kotori and Yuuma and the people he used to pass on the street; because Alit has fallen in love too many times to count, with specific people and with people in general, with stars and food and light and sound, and now he is here in the now and humanity isn’t quite so enchanting from the inside)

But they deal. They clutch at one another and raise each other up, and they come out of their trysts bruised and bleeding and aching but it’s the kind of ache that hurts well; the kind of ache that comes from the healing of long-open wounds, from walking without stop or rest.

It’s a long road, and they walk it with heavy feet and bleeding hearts but they walk it, nonetheless.

(they walk it, in the end, with clasped hands and company down the path, and though the stars no long sing for Alit and never have for IV they make a kind of song between them where neither of them had quite been able to alone; they walk a path that neither of them had been able to quite find in the dark but that they light now, for each other)


End file.
